Children's bodies aren't like automobiles with the assailant's fingerprints lingering on the wheel. The world of sexual abuse is quintessentially secret. It is the perfect crime.

Beatrix Campbell (b. 1947), British journalist. Unofficial Secrets, ch. 2 (1988).
In the book's introduction, Campbell quotes a police source on the subject: "Sexual abuse is like a corpse on a slab, saying nothing. You've got nothing to go on. It's a police officer's nightmare. You just want it to go away."

A society in which adults are estranged from the world of children, and often from their own childhood, tends to hear children's speech only as a foreign language, or as a lie.... Children have been treated ... as congenital fibbers, fakers and fantasisers.